Super Talent adds second USB 3.0 thumb drive series

Just as USB 2.0 thumb drives have become ubiquitous in recent years, their USB 3.0 successors seem likely to multiply. Super Talent has now launched its second USB 3.0 thumb drive family in just over three months: the USB 3.0 Express Drive, which is on track to become available in 16GB and 32GB flavors worldwide next month.

According to Super Talent, the new offerings can hit transfer speeds of up to 125MB/s when hooked up to a USB 3.0 port. These puppies are also backward-compatible with second-gen ports, but those will limit performance to a theoretical maximum of 60MB/s. Then again, sustained transfer rates sound a bit lower than the quoted maximum—at full speed, Super Talent says a USB 3.0 Express Drive can copy a 600MB video in "only a mere 12 seconds." That works out to 50MB/s or so.

In many ways, the newcomers look like smaller and slower siblings of Super Talent's USB 3.0 RAIDDrive series, which have capacities of up to 128GB with top quoted transfer rates of over 300MB/s. The RAIDDrive models also measure 95 x 34 x 15.4 mm, compared to 62 x 37 x 7.5 mm for the USB 3.0 Express Drives.